Advice for Networking Project

I am starting a project to use Python within a network to do the following:

1) Monitor the network.
2) Create scripts to run at certain times (De-frag on wednesday at 6pm for example).
3) Throw up a warning message to users if the Disk Space is running low.

I am a fairly confident programmer with Java, C#, Bash and Python but not so good with networks. Can anyone offer some advice on how I can use the Python Language to complete the tasks outlined above. I have looked at Python Sockets for connection and connection-less data sending from server to a client so far.